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Monday, November 30, 2015

My Experience Working for the Mormon Church Part 3

My story of Working for the Mormon Church Part: 3

Months past and not much happened in new openings for full-time employment. I, and many others like me, were stuck as part-time employees slowly losing hours since they were hiring too many on-call employees. Since Eddy became a full-time employee, I grew desperate in finding other work elsewhere.

Things didn’t get any better at the Church, in fact things grew worse. After having a few sleepless nights due to a newborn in the family, I got to work very tired and stressed.

There was work for me to do to gain what felt like more points for the LDS way of recruiting employees. I got to my now empty cubicle and did some work that Jo game me and another on-call. She pretty much gave it to us by e-mail and told us, “Whoever gets their half done first.” gets the moral award and my full respect. So it was all-out competition to the highest. Pretty much who ever got the job done the fastest for Jo was going to gain “points” for future chances of getting hired full-time the next time an opening comes along. Which was months at a time.

So I went into the Google Drive, and saw that this other on-call was already a few steps ahead of me. So I got started and jammed into the project. The project was like all the others, copy and paste number codes into a front-end WordPress-like system for LDS.org. It was dull, but in during this the videos on the site would show up and play for the users.

After a few hours I was able to get my half done around the same time as the other on-call, even if I started late in the race. I was very tired, but feeling great! I left work that day feeling better. It wasn’t all good since earlier that day I bombed another job interview for another company.

My confidence and pride once again crashed when I showed up to work a few days later when our department leader Ken, called me into an open office. I sat confused and worried about what the heck was going on. So Ken gave me the news.

He sat down across from me and told me that i’ve screwed up on a few projects the past few weeks. Mainly not telling me what projects, or from whom complained to him on my regard. I was shocked, feeling of why no one called me up for the mistakes when I was working on the projects and why they never told me by e-mail, or face-to-face afterwards.

Instead they wrote to Ken on the mistakes I made. Ken then told me to get my ass in gear and work better. I left work that day once again feeling low and useless.

A month later I was able to work hard in detail and communicate with my fellow full-time employees. I’ve also noticed how my work load was slowing down, and when I called out to them by e-mail, no one of the 20 full-time people would give me work.

So my work days were shortened from 7 hour days to 3. I was working less and making less since I was getting paid hourly. My wife just had a baby and surgery and we were struggling to make payments.

Issues with HR and the Church Financial Department

One day I got to work on a Monday finding my time cards of the past three weeks on my desk: REJECTED. As an on-call employee, you have to write up a weekly time card of the projects and hours you’ve worked. Then having it signed by both Ken and my team lead. Then handing it into the HR person, whom was as scary and mean as a cobra snake.

So this HR fellow decided to reject not one week’s time cards, but three! So the past three weeks I wasn’t paid. I was very upset and wanted to scream at the HR employee, whom decided to wait to inform me after three time cards before rejecting them all. I asked her why the forms were rejected and why it took three weeks to give me the news.

“You didn’t fill the forms right!” she said rudely, “So refill all three weeks and give them to me, you need to stop doing this!”

I was like, “What, ‘keep doing this’, it would of helped if you told me this two weeks ago, now my wife and I will have almost a month of no pay just after she had surgery and a newborn.”

She looked at me with a stink-eye look, without any care on my situation and barked, “Just hurry up and fill them for me!”

I went back to my desk and right away I filled them out and gave the time cards to her. I demanded to have them sent to the financial department, and Ken was able to do so, thus helping me get paid soon and not having to wait another week. A total of four weeks!

However, Ken was still not on my case and told me to just fill the forms right the first time. “That’s what I told HR, if she would of the first time, this would of never happened.” I said.

A few days later Ken came back and told me that he was able to get the financial department to forward my timecards late in the week, even if they were “Very annoyed and upset at me.” in the process. This made me feel less motivated about not only how Members of the Church ran things in HQ, but how the employees were starting to become.

It seemed the longer I worked at the LDS Church Office Building, the worst the true colors of it’s employees showed. I’ve started seeing the wall street, Washington style office politics and corruption. Let alone all the passive aggressive, backstabbing behavior and favoritism in the office.

I recalled a time I was sitting on a empty desk during a meeting on the 27th floor and a lady employee came in and rudely demanded me to get my ass off her chair. And another time where my team was holding a meeting in a board room and another team just walked in and started getting their things set up, even when my team wasn’t finished yet. They looked at us and demanded us to hurry up and leave. So instead of making a fuss, we left and finished our meeting in the hallway. Crazy, rude stuff like that.

However, there was another time that made me ill. I watched in horror one afternoon when my team leader yelled and swore over the phone to another on-call employee, then bashed and mocked the employee after hanging up the phone to other employees. I would hear dirt about other LDS clients and leaders curse, demand and behavior like dictators towards our team when timelines were not met. Like this was not some humble, Christ-like work, but more like some diva boss at a fashion magazine company in New York, or a third world sweat shop.

The employees around me in the breakroom became rude to me and very passive. Another thing that bothered me was the fact of how us on-calls felt mistreated. Such as when the department christmas luncheon took place, only full-time employees were invited. How much money the Church makes daily and how they never reveal it. Along with “saving money” by not hiring more full-time employees, and giving on-call employees old laptops with no Adobe Software. We had to do our photo edits and hard coding on third-party web browsers.

Lets not forget all the emails from employees of adding all the extra !!! and ALL CAPS over demands by means of emails. It got so bad that our department held a “Passive Aggressive 101” class to stop all this madness. But yet, the worst was still to come.